She had been thinking about it for years. Not with dread, particularly. More the way you think about a result you've requested and are waiting for. You do not know if it will be good news. You have done what you can do. Now you wait.
Lian had made choices she was not proud of and choices she was. She had not been precise in her accounting, which seemed to be the point: the weight was not something you could calculate early, which was either a mercy or a design. She had spent a long time not being sure which.
The reading did not arrive as a number.
It arrived as a recognition: sudden and complete, the way you recognize a face you haven't seen in forty years. Here it was. Here was what the sum amounted to. She held it for what felt like a long time, though she understood she was not holding it so much as it was holding her.
It was not what she had expected. She had expected it to center on the large things: the year she had left, the years she had stayed, the person she had never called back, the work she had done and the work she had abandoned. But the weight did not fall where she had placed it. The things she had feared accounted for less than she thought. The things she hadn't considered at all accounted for more.
She looked at her daughter, who was looking at her.
Her daughter asked if she was all right. Lian was looking at something her daughter couldn't see.